Flat Design
User Experience (UX) topic overview/definition

What is Flat Design?

Flat design is a user interface design style that uses simple, two-dimensional elements and bright colors. It is often contrasted to the skeuomorphic style that gives the illusion of three dimensions through copying real-life properties. Its popularity became prominent with the release of Windows 8, Apple’s iOS 7, and Google’s Material Design, all of which utilize flat design.

Flat design was originally developed for responsive design, where a website’s content scales smoothly depending on the device’s screen size. With the use of simple shapes and minimal textures, flat design ensures that responsive designs work well and load fast (especially important since mobile devices have slower internet speeds). By reducing the amount of visual noise (in the form of textures and shadows), flat design provides users with a streamlined and more optimal user experience.

However, despite its popularity, flat design also has drawbacks regarding the user experience. The absence of three-dimensional effects (e.g., drop shadows) takes away the cues that indicate how a user can interact with a design. For example, buttons in the flat design style do not appear distinct from other visual elements on a webpage, and therefore do not appear clickable. Because of this danger, flat design is increasingly applied in a more balanced way, often referred to as “flat design 2.0” or “almost flat design.” This trend takes the clean and simple visuals from flat design and adds some subtle skeuomorphic qualities such as color variations and shadows. With this increased depth and dimension, visual variety increases and usability improves. For instance, Google’s Material Design and Apple’s iOS interfaces heavily use shadows and/or blurring effects to make their interfaces more intuitive to use.

Literature on Flat Design

Here’s the entire UX literature on Flat Design by the Interaction Design
Foundation, collated in one place:

Featured article

Flat Design – An Introduction

With the dawn of personal computing skeuomorphic design became important to introduce users, unfamiliar with technology, to new concepts. Skeuomorphism takes a simple approach – it creates lifelike affordances in user interfaces (UI) that the user can relate to from their real lives. Thus when you delete a file – it goes in the trash can on screen. The act of throwing something away is something that everyone can relate to.

As time progressed skeuomorphic design became ever more realistic with concepts lovingly rendered in 3-dimensions. Many designers felt that this approach was becoming increasingly redundant. Users were more familiar with IT than ever before and in addition there was nothing about a 3D trash can that added any particular value over a 2D rendering of the same trash can.

Flat design is a style of interface design that rejects the 3D elements of skeuomorphism. It does not, contrary to popular opinion, abandon skeuomorphism in its entirety but rather focuses on rendering objects in flat minimalist form. It avoids the excessive use of gradients, textures, and drop shadows designed to deliver 3D effects for simpler elements focusing on simple flat elements, typography and flat color schemes.

Flat design is all encompassing in its approach and can be found everywhere in certain designs if you look hard enough. For example; these flat emoticons.

There is an added benefit of this design approach – it is not just for aesthetics – 2 dimensional objects are far easier to scale within responsive designs that adapt to different screen or browser sizes. This has become far more important with the advent of the mobile web.

A Brief History of Flat Design

Flat design is not entirely new and has been inspired from 3 existing forms of art: The Swiss Style (or International Typographic Style), Bauhaus and Modernism. Of the three, it is probably Swiss Style which has had the largest impact on flat design. Flat design in the real world became popularized in the 1950s and 1960s but the digital world would be rather slower to catch up.

There is a good example of early digital flat design to be found in Microsoft’s ill-fated Zune MP3 player which was launched back in 2006. The interface was both clean and simple and used lower-case typography in a large font size, silhouette styled logo design and plain monochromatic fonts.

The Zune may no longer be with us but the UI styling continued first into Windows Phone and later into the much derided (though not for its flat design) Windows 8 operating system.

The Zune may never really have captured the MP3 player market’s imagination but its legacy lives on in flat design.

In 2013 Apple joined the flat design party with the release of iOS7 deliberately rejecting previous skeuomorphic designs.

Jony Ive (Head of Design for Apple) said; “When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”

Isn’t Flat Design Boring?

Well, Microsoft and Apple don’t think so but yes, some people think that flat design is boring design. However, the truth is that minimalistic design styles are popular and eliminating unnecessary clutter from a design can improve its usability. If a component of a design serves no utility it may hinder the user experience and thus it should be eliminated from the design itself.

Much of the appeal of flat design is found in the implementation. The use of attention grabbing bright (and highly contrasting) color, for example, can help make icons, images, etc. really stand out from backgrounds. Clever use of flat design can also help guide the user’s eyes to where the designer wants them to be in their design.

Flat design definitely doesn’t have to be boring, though it can be. User testing can help you determine whether your flat designs wow users or turn them off.

It’s also easy to argue that the simplicity of flat design is what makes it so effective. The simpler the image that conveys a message – the easier the message is to understand.

What Does Flat Design Mean to UI Designers?

Flat design enables the UI designer to think of their designs as a functional tool. Their work will be measured based on the value that the design brings to the user rather than simply on aesthetic appeal. Many UI designers feel that this focus enables them to concentrate on user experience more than graphic design to the benefit of their businesses and customers alike.

What Goes Into a Flat Design?

The good news is that flat designs are pretty easy to create. The designer needs to focus on simple experiences and can then use:

iOS7 showed how much could be achieved through flat design in the hands of skilled designers.

The Take Away

Flat design is a minimalist approach to UI design. It is intended to reduce complexity in the design and thus enhance the user experience. It is not the only approach to UI design and material design and skeuomorphism (in the form of rich design) are also possible considerations when putting together a UI. It is important to carry out research to discover what it is that your users want and not rely on any standard approach for UI design without getting their input first.